Yahoo! Answers user James Matthew posted this question in Religion/Spirituality: “Is this the most insane form of Christian delusion?” He expounds:

I asked my internet Christian friend how she is able to believe something that does not have any evidence for its existence.

She gave me the following answer.

“I leave all my logical reasoning and thinking capability and go to HIS throne like how a child goes its father. He is the potter and I am the clay in HIS hands. If so, how can I question HIS existence and authority to prove my logical reasoning??”

With Christian friends like this, no wonder he’s an atheist.

Recently, I posted something on the second greatest commandment. I’d like to note that the Greatest Commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Mt 22:37; Mk 12:30; Lk 10:37). I think it is terrible when Christians actually tell people that they check their minds at the door wherever God is involved, as Matthew’s friend has done in this case.

God has commanded us to love him with our minds, which means that we don’t check reason at the door when we go to him. Yet, this seems to be how atheists view us. User lordfrig said, “Most? That is the normal belief of christians and religious folk in general.” It’s normal nowadays, but this wasn’t normal in the time of the apostles. Even a cursory reading of the Acts of the Apostles would bear that out.

Some Christian users follow Alvin Plantinga’s reasoning that God is a properly basic belief. User Mickey GG had this to say:

C S Lewis expands on the idea and shows why the non Christian really has no logical alternative but to accept that Jesus is God:

“I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.”

Not bad. The trilemma is still a classic, but only if you accept that Scripture is accurately reporting what Jesus said and did. Unfortunately, with academic think-tanks like the Jesus Seminar and the new Jesus Project, it is becoming evident that most don’t accept that Scripture is accurate.

Scott B is almost there:

How well has logic and reasoning done in answering the basic question as to the orgin of life? In the end just to believe in our own existence we have to exhibit a level in faith. Logically by the standards of science that man created, we shouldn’t even be here. Whether you are a proponent of the Big Bang Theory, Abiogeneisis, or God… none have been proved. So to believe we exist is to believe in something that hasn’t been proven, so why give only the Christians a hard time about it?

This isn’t too bad of an answer. He’s right in saying that science fails to prove any theory on the origin of life, whatever you happen to subscribe to. Science, however, has a better shot at proving abiogenesis than it does God, since abiogenesis would be a natural process. Science looks only to naturalistic explanation, and God falls outside that purview.

As such, Plantinga promotes Reformed epistemology, which says that you can believe in God with no evidence. You believe, for example, that your senses function properly, that rough is really rough, and that the sky is blue with no direct evidence that any of that is true. Why not believe in God in the same way?

Of course, the alternative is to attack the motives of the person asking the question. Carl said:

It is not insane, it is your friends belief.
You call her your friend and ridicule her?
She gave you her answer, how was she to know you just wanted to hurt her?

He’s got a point. James Matthew asked, and his friend answered. It seems, though one can’t be sure, that Matthew received this answer and took it to the Yahoo! discussion boards rather than trying to discuss it with his friend. I hope I’m wrong about that, but that is how things seem to stand. That’s not very friend-like.

Ricardo misunderstands “faith,” typical of most atheists:

You are trying to use logic and intelligence on some one who has “faith” which really means “I no longer have to think”. It is a losing game.

That is not what faith means. Faith is a reasoned trust based on past performance. It does not take the place of evidence, it is only given once the evidence is established. I advocate the death penalty for atheists who continue in this misunderstanding despite all the evidence to the contrary.